Facebook Audience Overlap Explained + Ways to Avoid It

What Is Facebook Audience Overlap?

Facebook audience overlap is when two or more ads from a company’s campaign target the same person (or people) on the social media platform.

As an extreme example, imagine two ad sets where one targets people interested in marketing tools and the other targets people interested in SEO tools.

Most of the people in the second audience (the SEO tools one) will also be in the first audience (the general marketing tools one).

Facebook uses a behind-the-scenes auction to determine which ad to show every time there’s an opportunity. That means only one of your ads will get shown when there are two competing for the same audience.

Having only one ad show consistently will mean the other one may have reduced performance and be using the assigned budget inefficiently.

The Importance of Avoiding Facebook Audience Overlap

Steering clear of audience overlap means you don’t waste time and effort creating ads that are never shown, that never have a chance to perform well, and fail to use your assigned budget effectively.

Creating an ad that’s never shown can be frustrating. And it can also lead to misunderstandings about performance.

Why?

Because Facebook uses a “learning phase” for each new ad (or a heavily edited existing one) that involves various tests to ensure the best possible performance.

You can tell when an ad is in this phase by checking the “Delivery” column inside Meta Ads Manager:

Because the platform is still experimenting, the ad’s...